They can get big: adult steelhead can reach 45 inches in length and weigh in at 55 pounds. Steelhead resemble Pacific salmon in a few other ways. Those eggs hatch, or some of them do, and the young steelhead run the gauntlet of the rivers until they reach the Delta, and then the Bay, and then the Pacific Ocean. Steelhead are anadromous, like the coho salmon - and like the chinook salmon with which it shares the streams that flow into the Bay Delta. They swim upstream into the cold headwaters of the Bay Delta's tributary streams, lay eggs, and fertilize them. The steelhead has been one of my favorite Californian wild animals since. I watched it feed on salmon eggs for a few hours, an honest to god wildlife passion play taking place before my eyes. It was a steelhead, the coho's smaller cousin. But every now and then the gray fish would get to the nest, gobble up a mouthful of salmon eggs in a hurry and dart away.
If it ventured out toward the female, the smaller male coho would try to chase it away. The largest of the males would periodically swim over the nest, fertilizing the eggs.Ī silver, 14-inch fish lurked off to the side of the pool. Three males surrounded a big female as she laid eggs in a gravel nest in just a few inches of water. Two decades ago I stood on the banks of a forested stream in Northern California, watching salmon spawn. Stay with /baydelta for all the project's stories. And at its core is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta. An explanatory series focusing on one of the most complex issues facing California: water sharing.
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